Monday, October 24, 2011

MSNBC Analyst: Respect the Group of 88's "Feelings"!

Few people have attempted to defend the Group of 88—perhaps because no credible defense of the rush-to-judgment faculty “activists” exists. Indeed, as the case to which they had attached their reputations imploded, nearly all Group members refused to comment on why they signed the April 2006 statement, which committed them not only to a common interpretation of the criminal case (something “happened” to false accuser Crystal Mangum) but also to a joint path forward (“turning up the volume” regardless of “what the police say or the court decides”).

Unlike nearly all members of the Group, Harris-Perry has some national visibility, thanks to her position as a frequent MSNBC commentator and a columnist for The Nation. In the latter capacity she recently penned an article that provided some insight into her race-obsessed thought process—exactly what could be expected from a Ph.D. student of Chafe and Lubiano. Her column accused white liberals of a “more insidious form of racism” than traditional, anti-black electoral racism for allegedly failing to back President Obama in the same percentages as they did President Clinton in 1996.

This absurd analysis was too much even for writers at traditionally left-leaning Salon. Joan Walsh, while quickly noting how much she considered Harris-Perry a professional friend, nonetheless gently observed that her friend “doesn’t mention any white liberals by name, nor cite polls showing a decline in support for President Obama among white liberals.” In other words: Harris-Perry had no evidence for her argument. (As will be seen, the Duke Ph.D. doesn’t seem to have problems with arguments lacking in empirical evidence.) Gene Lyons was less constrained by the trappings of collegiality. He argued that the Harris-Perry essay “resembles a photo negative of white racist thought . . . Turning everything into an issue of ethnic identity . . . appears to be Professor Harris-Perry’s stock in trade . . . Maybe academia isn’t the only place in American life where it’s possible to call people bigots and expect them to prove their innocence. But it’s definitely one of a very few . . . [I]f Harris-Perry expects people to defer to her Ph.D., she needs to raise her game.” And these criticisms, again, came from people generally sympathetic to Harris-Perry’s ideological goals.

But, even though I was an Obama supporter in 2008 and will remain so for 2012, Harris-Perry doubtless would dismiss me, too, as an insidiously racist white liberal. After all, I have publicly expressed horror with the Obama administration’s hostility to due process in higher education and my deep disappointment with the President’s indifference to the 2009 plebiscite that annulled the marriage equality law in my home state of Maine.

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Harris-Perry’s defense of the Group of 88 comes in her recently-published book, Sister Citizen: Shame, Stereotypes, and Black Women in America. Here’s how the Duke Ph.D. introduces the lacrosse case:

A woman lies about being sexually assaulted. The young men she accuses are assumed by both the press and the legal system to be guilty. A powerful institution bends to the public assumption of guilt and collaterally punishes a group of young men associated with the accused. The legal system eventually exonerates these young men. In the aftermath of the findings of innocence, the false accuser and those who uncritically accepted her honesty are subjected to public ridicule, just as they had earlier subjected the young men to ridicule.

The passage’s superficially neutral structure initially seems reasonable. Harris-Perry frames the case as the sum of two events: (1) the accusation and its response; and (2) the subsequent criticism (“public ridicule”) of Mangum and her validators.

Only by pondering a bit does Harris-Perry’s insidious (to borrow a word) false equivalence emerge.The initial event—the “crime”—did not occur. The second event—the embrace and exploitation of Mangum’s tale (including, although Harris-Perry carefully avoids mentioning it, by much of the faculty) despite increasingly solid evidence to the contrary—did occur. Yet Harris-Perry treats the two sets of reactions as equivalent:“the false accuser and those who uncritically accepted her honesty are subjected to public ridicule, just as they had earlier subjected the young men to ridicule.”

Even given Harris-Perry’s false equivalence, one might think that such a prominent public intellectual would be curious as to why many members of the media, the local prosecutor, and professors at Duke were so inclined to believe a false accuser. Or why a “powerful institution”—an institution of higher learning, no less, an institution supposedly devoted to pursuit of truth and knowledge—bowed to the mob.

Yet Harris-Perry offers no interest in these issues. Instead, she focuses on what she seems to see as the real victims of the case: her mentors and their pedagogical allies. She wants to know what motivated the critics of Mike Nifong and the Group of 88, and she wants to critically analyze their writings. Given that she sees racism everywhere, it doesn’t take a Ph.D. to figure out what she’s going to argue.

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Here’s how Harris-Perry introduces the handiwork of her onetime mentor, Professor Lubiano:

The social disaster [Group of 88] ad argued that the faculty had gained important insights about the case and its social and cultural meaning by listening to the testimonies of students. This epistemological claim was scorned as ridiculous when the weight of DNA evidence showed that Crystal Mangum was being dishonest about the sexual assault. These black women professors, their students, and their faculty colleagues were told to be ashamed of ever believing that their own experiences, beliefs, and feelings [emphasis added] were valid.

Leave aside the wildly incomplete nature of Harris-Perry’s description—that the most inflammatory aspects of the ad (something “happened” to Mangum; thanking the protesters for not waiting; committing to action regardless of what the police or court found; falsely claiming official endorsement from several Duke academic departments) came not from professors “listening to the testimonies of students” but in the voices of the signatories themselves.

And, even, leave aside the outright inaccurate nature of Harris-Perry’s description—the ad’s claims initially were “scorned” as “ridiculous” not because of evidence emerging that Mangum had lied, but because the signatories abandoned the academy’s traditional fealty to upholding due process.

Instead, consider the final sentence of the passage. In Harris-Perry’s world, the “feelings” of professors (or at least of “black women professors”) must be considered “valid”—because, as the Duke Ph.D. explains, “black feminist scholarship assumes that experiential knowledge has equal weight with empirical evidence.” How this rationale would excuse the Group members who weren’t black feminist scholars Harris-Perry never reveals.

In any event, despite Harris-Perry’s extraordinary downgrading of the importance of “empirical evidence” in the academic process, institutions of higher learning are supposed to pursue knowledge; they should not function as validators of “feelings,” even of “black women professors.”

That said, Harris-Perry’s rationale does represent an argument for “diversity” hires: academic qualifications can be deemed less important if the goal is to hire professors who will sympathize with the “feelings” of sensitive minority groups on campus, even if that means publicly attacking other students at the school. By these standards, Wahneema Lubiano—she of the perpetually-forthcoming manuscripts—is a potential Pulitzer Prize winner.

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Harris-Perry’s concern for the “feelings” of “black women professors” informs her criticism of Until Proven Innocent—although she can’t manage to faithfully reproduce the book’s critique of the academic culture that spawned the Group of 88. The book, she claims, argues against “taking race and gender seriously as objects of academic inquiry.” Neither the book nor the blog, of course, ever made such a claim. The blog did critically examine some of the poor scholarship produced by race/class/gender-oriented faculty at Duke; and both the blog and the book did contend, repeatedly, that groupthink oriented around these themes has become extremely powerful not only at Duke but at most campuses, and that the effects of this groupthink explain the “activist” faculty’s rush to judgment on the case.

UPI, Harris-Perry fumes, also termed the Group of 88 “ungrateful, unpatriotic, and dangerous to the impressionable students they teach.” It’s not clear how the book could have portrayed the Group as “ungrateful,” even if had such an intent. Nor did the book even remotely touch upon the Group members’ patriotism; it would have been absurd to have done so. And both the book and the blog quite consciously stayed away from the “impressionable minds” argument. Beyond the obvious—if Lubiano teaches anything like she writes, it’s hard to imagine her leaving much of an impression on anyone—that line of criticism, most closely associated with David Horowitz’s indoctrination claims, is one I have publicly, and repeatedly, rejected. Yet much like previous Group apologists, Harris-Perry seems determined to assume that anyone who criticized the Group must have operated from Horowitzian motives.

But, in the end, Harris-Perry sees her role less as fighting David Horowitz than in providing (in Lyons’ words) a “photo negative of white racist thought.” On paper, Stuart Taylor and I don’t present inviting targets. Harris-Perry concedes that we never targeted professors based on their race or gender: while we criticized black women such as Lubiano or Holloway, we were “equally virulent in [our] critique of white male professors such as William Chafe or Peter Wood.” And she further understands that we “reserve our most virulent attacks for Nifong, a white man.”

But when “empirical evidence” won’t do, it’s time to employ other approaches to insinuate racism. By noting that Nifong’s political interest in the case came in his appealing to the black vote, Harris-Perry contends that UPI “implicate[d] the corrupting influence of black political power.” The book’s critiques of both academic and local political culture, Harris-Perry concludes, “contain powerful racial implications.” Indeed, she implies, our words tried to leave “black women professors” on Duke’s faculty with a sense of “shame.”

Under Harris-Perry’s anti-racist framework, how would any criticism of Nifong, or the Group of 88, ever have been possible? The Duke Ph.D. doesn’t claim that UPI, in having “carefully trace[d] the professional résumés and personal conduct” of several Group members, got anything wrong in its analysis of their writings, or that the book wrongly argued that the Group members’ race/class/gender agenda explained their decision to exploit Mangum’s claims for their own ends on campus. Harris-Perry doesn’t dispute the findings of UPI (and many others, including the State Bar) that Nifong’s political ambitions were linked to his unethical behavior, and that the only way he could win (in both the spring and fall 2006 campaigns) was through obtaining disproportionate black support.

It seems that using “empirical evidence” to point out the above facts constitutes inappropriate racial insensitivity. In Harris-Perry’s world, because of the moral justness of their cause, race/class/gender faculty on campus—or those who pander to black voters outside the ivory tower—must be sheltered from criticism. Any other course, alas, might disrespect their “feelings.”

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At its most basic level, Harris-Perry’s book reinforces one of the basic critiques of the academy featured in this blog. In the case, Harris-Perry’s race-obsessed, evidence-thin analysis most closely resembles that of the Committee for Justice for Mike Nifong. Yet while the Committee is widely, and appropriately, viewed as a laughingstock in the legal community, Harris-Perry and her pedagogical allies are mainstream voices in the academy, and dominate most humanities and some social science departments.

40 comments:

Anonymous
said...

Lubiano's feelings > Empirical evidence and Justice and the lives of three innocent boys and Due Process and fact-based reporting. That equation is relatively simple, Professor Johnson. Get it right next time!

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Harris-Perry wrote: "The social disaster [Group of 88] ad argued that the faculty had gained important insights about the case and its social and cultural meaning by listening to the testimonies of students."

Let me get this straight, the 88 gained insight into the Mangum case from gossip?

None of the students were ever identified as members of the Duke or Durham Police Departments or as medical personnel who handled Mangum at Duke Hospital. So, the 88 must have "gained important insights about the case" from gossip.

On another note, what exactly was the "social and cultural meaning" that one could gain listening to students embracing a false accusation? The "social and cultural meaning" that the 88 should have gained by listening to the students was that their students shouldn't be rushing to judgment based only on gossip. MOO! Gregory

This is supposedly another quote from the Harris-Perry Fairy Tale, at least according to liestoppers:

"Less than a year after Hurricane Katrina revealed patterns of festering racial inequalityand prompted national conversations about black citzenship, these eighty-eight members of the Duke faculty chose to frame the lacrosse scandal as a disaster. In the long shadow of Hurricane Katrina, this choice is an important clue to the multiple meanings associated with the rape accusation. In this context, 'disaster' evokes a sense of unequal vulnerability to supposedly neutral processes. The faculty members were drawing a link between the abandonment of black citzens in the aftermath of Katrina and the sense of vulnerability that many black men, white women, and especially black women felt on Duke's campus."

That's so stupid it's funny! Instead of saying that the word "disaster evokes a sense of unequal vulnerability to supposedly neutral processes," the author should have said that the word disaster should be set aside for something bad that has actually happened.

It should be noted that Professor Johnson utterly debunked the claim that the "Social Disaster" ad had anything to do with Hurricane Katrina OVER FOUR YEARS AGO. He did it by simply using actual evidence, Lubiano's "cover letter" for the ad itself, which plainly stated it was all about the Mangum case. MOO! Gregory

Moreover, how is Harris-Perry helping her 88 friends by claiming that those 88 equated a "disaster" that actually happened and killed at least 1,800 human beings with something that didn't even happen?

Does Harris-Perry not realize she is making her 88 friends look stupid? MOO! Gregory

Harris-Perry, and those like her, present Duke's biggest long-term reputational challenge. Duke will simply never be able to walk away from their affiliation with these wacko ass-clowns. And every time they open their mouths (or "write" something), they remind the world anew about Duke's shamefully low academic standards.

'...the false accuser and those who uncritically accepted her honesty are subjected to public ridicule, just as they had earlier subjected the young men to ridicule.' The lacrosse players weren't exposed to 'public ridicule;' they were exposed to felony indictments, possible prison time, heavy legal expenses, and the ruination of their reputations. The G88-er's were exposed to -- praise, prizes and promotions. Hardly seems symmetrical.

If Rush Limbaugh can become a opinion leader in American conservatism with an eight year contract worth $400 Million, why shouldn't we expect Melissa Harris-Perry and Karla Holloway to at least try and pull off the same 'slam-dunk' with groups other than conservatives?

After all we're just talking about becoming an opinion leader where searching for the truth is not an especially important value.

Well, truth searching might be important for Tulane but opinion leaders will be long gone from the university if they can figure out how to compete with Rush.

We've all learned from the Duke lacrosse rape hoax case that university endowments and government grants are wonderful sources of seed money for those who aspire to become opinion leaders on Race, Gender and Politics in the South.

Professor, would you please explain something....other than making money for themselves by securing faculty jobs, and sucking up to one another at pseudo academic gatherings, what in the world do these 88 types hope to accomplish, gain, improve, etc.....for themselves and for their supposed "community"? I cannot imagine a more embarrassing representative of my race than any single member of the 88. I am insulted, still, to be in the same town with these clowns.

So glad that Mr. Johnson lets us know that he was an Obama supporter in 08 and will remain one in 12 no matter what. This is the kind of mindless liberalism that allows people like Harris-Perry to get the upper hand.

I followed this blog almost daily during the Duke/Nifong/Durham fiasco, and I value my copy of 'Until Proven Innocent', so nothing in this post surprised me except that you expect to support Obama in the next election. If you don't see the problem with that now, you probably never will. If you embrace Obama, what, again, was it about the 88 that bothered you?

The author lost me at "I'll support Obama in 2012." This indicates willing acceptance of a Justice Department gone very, very violently off the tracks - "Fast & Furious, The New Black Panthers, The Pigsford settlement, etc. If one finds fault with an egregious beast like the Group of 88, it boggles the mind that he/she would give a double thumbs up to Holder & Co.

And this is exactly the rationale used in the lynchings of black men for more than a century. "String him up -- we know he's guilty!"

Professor Johnson, there's one thing I don't understand about you. Historian Robert Conquest's First Law of Politics is "Everyone is conservative about what he knows best." You are an expert on the circus at Duke, so of course you are condemned by leftists as a racist, fascist tool of AmeriKKKan Imperialistic Patriarchy. Yet you apparently subscribe to other claims promulgated by leftists -- notably on MSNBC and by the Obama Administration -- some of them by the same people who are condemning you. How can you dismiss the possibility that these people are lying to you about issues that you haven't investigated in depth?

One of the real problems, regardless of race, is that we're accepting at face value that too many of people with 'degrees' are intelligent thinkers... this woman is not intelligent, all of her credentials are the usual academic fluffery that has become rampant in the U.S. Granted it became illegal for corporations to hire employees based upon I.Q. tests, etc., but as corporations began requiring acedemic degrees in the stead of of intelligence/aptitude tests, the liberal college community skewed the system with meaningless degrees. Our whole system is broken. Let's quit discussing Melissa Harris-Perry as if her thoughts have any intellectual merit. She is a lightweight bomb thrower hiding behind a spurious degree.

Good grief. It's OWS personified. Cloistered 'academics' foist utter bilge on their charges, who graduate with degrees in 'women's studies' and other such argle bargle, then debate each other on the internet. Then, armed with their body piercings, purple hair, and trusty degree, they head out to whine because Duke took them for a hundred grand or so and they can't understand why they can't find a job. Jesus...Allah...Buddha...your deity of choice...wept.

It seems that using “empirical evidence” to point out the above facts constitutes inappropriate racial insensitivity.

That's the key sentence right there. Empirical evidence doesn't care about racial insensitivity. That's a problem for a lot of people, and many of them have set out to do something about it. To that end, the facts must make the appropriate accommodations.

As several have mentioned, I sat upright when KC expressed his support for Obama then and now. How could someone so lucid and accurate in his analysis of the Duke lacrosse case be so clueless politically? There has never been a more race-huckstering, race-conscious president than Obama. I think group-think in academia is stronger than we all realize.

In my opinion Melissa Harris-Perry has deep unresolved issues that preclude her being taken seriously as an advocate of blacks or women. The following is from her bio on the thenation.com:

Melissa Victoria Harris was born in Seattle and grew up in the Virginia cities of Charlottesville and Chester, where she attended Thomas Dale High School. She was the youngest of five children of a black father, William M. Harris Sr., the dean of Afro-American affairs at the University of Virginia, and a white mother, Diana Gray, who taught at a community college and worked for nonprofits that helped poor communities.[3][4] “I’ve never thought of myself as biracial,” Harris-Perry says. “I’m black.”[5]

To me the last sentence clearly and glibly dismisses her mother's contribution to her gene pool, making it very difficult to see how she could claim to be a feminist, and at the same time claim to be only black when the evidence clearly shows otherwise makes her a racist.

Oh yeah, now I get it.....If you are black, then you don't need to worry about FACTS. If you are white, then you can't use FACTS. If you are a racist bigoted pseudo academic dim bulb (black, white, fuscia or plaid, then you make up "FACTS". As my Dad often said (RIP), "I don't care if you didn't know it was wrong.....you did it....get the belt". Harris-Perry would not have lasted a day in my house, with my Dad, without getting her racist butt spanked.

Since Professor Johnson has used this tool to great effect in the past, I thought I'd give it a go. Here is the photo negative of Harris-Perry's quotation:

"A white woman lies about being sexually assaulted. The young black men she accuses are assumed by both the press and the legal system to be guilty. A powerful institution bends to the public assumption of guilt and collaterally punishes the NAACP, which is associated with the accused. The legal system eventually exonerates these young black men. In the aftermath of the findings of innocence, the white false accuser and those who uncritically accepted her honesty are subjected to public ridicule, just as they had earlier subjected the young black men to ridicule."

I wonder how Harris-Perry would deal with that scenario? Would she demand balance in the ridicule heaped on liberal attorney George Chamlee and the NAACP with the ridicule heaped on false accuser Victoria Price and the local and national press in the Scottsboro case?

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On another note, I too will vote for the same person I voted and campaigned for in 2008. To conflate Durham politics with that of our President is the worst and laziest political thinking. Would you conflate Harris-Perry with La Shawn Barber? MOO! Gregory

The fact that Prof Johnson is an Obama supporter is of no concern to me, as it relates to his analysis and outstanding commentary about the lacrosse hoax. What it says, at least to me, is that he is NOT a blind party ticket-puncher who goes along with the liberal agenda, no matter the issue. There are many of us who are issue-specific thinkers like Johnson....including me.....a conservaliberalist, I guess.I just got another Duke plea for dollars. Gonna copy another alum's idea and send them 88 cents.

"Controversy over allegedly sexist remarks made by Prof. Grant Farred, Africana and English, was reignited this week after he was appointed to chair the department’s faculty search committee. Backing a letter circulated on Thursday by an anonymous group called “Sojourner Tubman Collective,” students and Prof. Margaret Washington, history and American studies, condemned Africana leadership and called for the immediate removal of Farred from the committee, to which he was appointed on Sept. 14."

I remain the eternal cautious optimist (although even my cautious optimism is being strained by what I keep reading on K.C. Johnson's blog). It is my (cautious) belief that *eventually* the harsh realities of the job market will knock some sense into at least some of those who chose to major in some identity-studies field. Maybe when they find they are unemployable, after ten or fifteen or more years of academia, a PhD and a few hundred thousand in student-loan debt, they will see the light. After all, how many Women's Studies, African-American Studies, and other identity-studies "Doctors" can academia absorb? And what happens when successive incoming students start seeing the light and the identity-studies departments find themselves without charges to teach?

I'm banking on an eventual implosion of this whole identity-studies thingy.

There is only gossip that Obama wanted an investigation. Nothing in his writing or a video of him saying this. Did President Obama request an investigation after he became the most powerful man in the world? I think not.NoD

@ 3:24: Actually, it's not gossip. A member of LieStoppers received a letter from President Obama. There is evidence. However, LieStoppers turned into a far right, anti-Obama message board, so the President probably doesn't give a sh*t what they have to say, anymore.

I'm sometimes amused at myself for imagining that there must at least be some shame, some scintilla of embarrassment, on the part of the Group et al. The LAX rush to judgment was a totally indefensible debacle, right? Must have mortified the agendists, right? They won't want to address it, correct? Nuh-uh. These people never quit. Imagine trying to defend a dog like that one, but they keep trying. In a way, you've go to hand it to them; they absolutely will not give up. In fact, I guess that by assuming that these folks should be/must be deeply ashamed, and by being astonished that they are not, I am being a racist pig. I shall have to turn myself in.

Having thankfully just seen (after nearly four years of imprisonment) the not guilty verdict in the Amanda Knox/Rafaele Sollecito case (a Duke LAX case on steroids in terms of i. the clear innocence of two of the accused and ii. the rogue prosecutor), Chris Halkides is talking about the possibility of an international Innocence Project. I recall very well that the NY-based Innocence Project had no interest in addressing the obvious injustices in the Duke case, but others have stepped forward (and others will step forward) who are not bound by a race based conscience. Any thoughts on the possibilities for such an enterprise?

"I recall very well that the NY-based Innocence Project had no interest in addressing the obvious injustices in the Duke case,"

Not only had it no interest, but Peter Neufeld spent considerable energy declaiming before various media outlets that the absence of DNA evidence in the lax case was meaningless. (This, after some 200 men had been freed from prison with far less DNA support). IMHO he really needs to address his stance on that...

That said, I think an international Innocence Project (using the NETas a base) might be very useful.

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"From the Scottsboro Boys to Clarence Gideon, some of the most memorable legal narratives have been tales of the wrongly accused. Now “Until Proven Innocent,” a new book about the false allegations of rape against three Duke lacrosse players, can join these galvanizing cautionary tales . . , Taylor and Johnson have made a gripping contribution to the literature of the wrongly accused. They remind us of the importance of constitutional checks on prosecutorial abuse. And they emphasize the lesson that Duke callously advised its own students to ignore: if you’re unjustly suspected of any crime, immediately call the best lawyer you can afford."--Jeffrey Rosen, New York Times Book Review